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Grammatical gender assignment in French: dispelling the native speaker myth

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 July 2017

DALILA AYOUN
DALILA AYOUN*
Affiliation:
University of Arizona
*
Address for correspondence: e-mail: ayoun@email.arizona.edu
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Abstract

This study highlights the complexity of French grammatical gender as a lexical property at the interface of morpho-phonology and the lexicon. French native speakers (n = 168) completed a gender assignment task with written stimuli illustrating common versus uncommon nouns, vowel-initial versus consonant-initial nouns, compounds and grammatical homonyms; they also indicated the strategies they used to assign a gender to stimuli. The findings showed strong lexical and gender effects suggesting that grammatical gender must be acquired for individual lexical items as morpho-phonological cues alone are unreliable and vary greatly.

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Articles
Information
Journal of French Language Studies , Volume 28 , Issue 1 , March 2018 , pp. 113 - 148
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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